Had a nice weekend full of baseball, friends, movies, and much-needed housework. When all was said and (mostly) done, I had a list of about five things that I wanted to accomplish, computer- or website-wise, that were left undone. I managed to plow through a couple of them (including my first photo uploads to this site in almost a year – check out the Storyhill pics from last Labor Day), but some were only half-finished. I had to try pretty hard to not be disappointed with myself, even after a nice June weekend.

Clearwater Lake, Deerwood, MN

Not having had a summer like this in over a decade, it’s hard for me to let myself roll with the proverbial punches and take advantage of the nice weather and low-obligation without a plan. I feel like if I don’t have a list, I’m going to miss out on something I should have been doing. But, I guess if the last ten years should have taught me anything, it’s that there will always be more time to get your list done.

I took a couple positive steps in the last week that I hope will lead to maximum summer enjoyment: I moved the BryGuy show back to the latest possible part of the evening (we’re starting at 9PM beginning this week), and I set all of the ‘to-do’s’ on my RTM list to be due no earlier than 8PM on any given day. Moreover, instead of insisting to myself that the tasks on that list get completed on the days I set them due, I opted to be satisfied with a little progress, and a revision of the date and specifics of the goal.

I had an enjoyable weekend in the Greater Twin Cities area, hanging out with Schneider, and taking a morning visit over to the Elko house.

Josh and I had a chance on Saturday night to go see Pirate Radio, which I think both of us enjoyed. Doesn’t change the fact that I don’t really get to watch a lot of movies anymore, though.

And that’s what my new system is all about. I have had enough of trying to keep up with what is currently available to see in theaters and trying to shoehorn in an occasion to get there. No, I will admit that most movies I want to see simply won’t be seen. That being said, I will now queue them up immediately on Netflix and just hope to get around to them eventually. Does this system make it more likely that I will see all these movies that I show some passing interest in? Probably. Eventually. The biggest difference is having a convenient place to keep a list.

So how about the Packers yesterday? While a lot of people in the press around the state seem to be gushing all over themselves, I have to remind people that the game was still extremely sloppy (Packers were lucky they were playing the one team that gets penalized almost as much) and it was 3-0 at halftime. Am I glad they won? Of course. Do I think it means anything in the long run? Of course not.

One of the little projects I monitored on the computer today while I was doing other things was an install of Windows XP on my desktop computer. I wanted to be sure that I could do a podcast again some time soon, and I know for sure that the hardware and software support that I need should work with this OS (Windows 7 is kind of wonky with audio mixing on my hardware).

I do have a nice, easy slipstream’d XP-plus-SP3 disc that I can run when I need to do an XP install (used nLite and the tutorial that I read quite some time ago on Lifehacker). I have it set up so that I don’t have to key in the product key, pick my time zone, tell it who my users are, things like that. I put in the CD, tell it where to install, and in about 20 minutes it’s pretty much all set.

The only thing lacking is all the other software that you want to have with your “basic” installation. When I rolled this disc, anyway, there was no means of adding extra (i.e., non-Windows) software to your deployment. So, I often end up downloading and reinstalling a bunch of stuff anyway. With that in mind, here is my list of software that I NEED for what I consider “basic functionality” when I do a new Windows installation.

It should be noted that I wrote this with XP in mind, but to my knowledge, nearly all this software works in Win 7, too.

Audacity

AVG anti-virus

DisplayFusion

Firefox

Image Resizer powertoy

Flash player

Java

Launchy

OpenOffice

Pidgin

cleartype tuner powertoy

Skype

Tomboy notes

VLC

WinSCP

7-zip

The good news: seems like the audio shat I need is back to functional. And I am back to making lunch…

Brett’s gonna come back again. Oh, yes he will. But I do think he proved last year that 2007 will gone down as his last great season.

Tons of kids staying home from school next week in the metro-Milwaukee area, what with the bacon disease. Hey, remember when we were kids, and there would be a chicken pox outbreak, and if you hadn’t had it yet, your mom would make sure you went to school, with instructions to lick all doorknobs trade pencils all your itchy friends? Yeah, I remember that, too.

Don’t know if they’ve changed much in Amarok 2 since I was last using it a couple months ago, but I will say this: the album shuffle seems to be doing a better job. I wonder if there’s anything else I can do to optimize the tags on my tunes..?

OK, well, I’m gonna eat some dinner and get ready for a party that Michelle and I are headed to in a couple hours. Yes, I know it’s already 8:30. The party goes until 3 AM. Seriously.

I grant you that I am a coffee snob– not of the highest order by any means, but I have a fairly particular set of criteria that need to be met in order for me to truly enjoy a cup. I understand that for a LOT of people, drinking coffee is less about the enjoyment of the beverage, and more about getting a fix. That is to say, they couldn’t give a shit what kind of coffee it is or what it tastes like, as long as it resembles coffee.

I have to take issue with this, for the same reason that I would take issue with someone that insists on drinking the milk after its expired– there is NO JUSTIFIABLE REASON to put yourself through that. Let me go over just a couple basic steps you can take to improve y0ur coffee experience, all of which require virtually no effort, and none of which I routinely observe people doing:

Wash the carafe on a daily basis. Most folks keep the coffeemaker in the kitchen. The sink is right there, and there is probably dish soap nearby as well. For those of you at work, if you have running water (and if you’re making coffee, you probably do), there’s no excuse not to as least wipe that mother out every day before you fill it back up.

Wash your cup on a daily basis. Hey, why not take BOTH to the sink at the same time???

Make an effort to clean the coffeemaker itself every 2 months or so. Do I sense a theme here? Absolutely! Yes, drinking the rancid remnants of pots gone by is affecting the taste of your beverage. Mix up a clear vinegar solution (mostly vinegar), drop an empty filter in the basket, and run the vinegar through on a regular brew cycle. Follow it up with 2 or 3 rounds of fresh water, just to rinse everything out. I know that this is the hardest of the three steps, and the one least likely to be taken, but it does make a difference.

I just realized that I haven’t posted in a couple days. It’s not for lack of work on the site, though. I’ve been slowly and surely updating some tags and categories on posts that were imported from the old tikiwiki blog (or earlier). My hope is that those updates will make searching the blog by tag, etc., a little more useful. Hey, even if it doesn’t end up that way for you, I think it will for me 😛

I am also desperately hoping each day that one of the plugins I use that is holding me back from upgrading to the latest version of WordPress with drop with an update, already. There are some features in the next iteration that I’m anxious to implement, but it just wouldn’t be senible to do so at this time. Hence, I check, refresh, check again, and I wait…

Outside of the metablogging, though, what can I tell you about the most recent weekend? The big BSG finale was on Friday night. I went over to Jason H’s place to see it with him and Brian. Jason has the 42″ flatscreen and HD cable, so… it was kind of worth it. I took a look back at my ‘Final Five Questions‘ from January, and without completely rehashing them, check this out:

Check

Check

Check

Adequate checkitude

Check

I was really satisfied with the finale and didn’t feel like any mysteries were left forgotten or issues left unanswered. Yes, it is entirely possible that there is something I’m forgetting, but not going to change my mind about the fact that I had a good time with the end of the series.

For those of you that are even kind-of interested in sci-fi and you missed this show, I highly recommend going back to the beginning and checking out the DVDs. I think you’ll find that it was one of those rare shows that was really solid from top to bottom and start to finish.